Feeling Stressed? Don’t Let It Spiral Out Of Control

February 5, 2018

Everyone experiences stress in their life, whether it’s from high-stress situations at work or stress arising from our personal lives. Stress is actually beneficial to a certain extent, as it is what drives us to create opportunities and face challenges. Stress can, however, become detrimental to our health if we experience a high level of stress over a long period of time. This article aims to highlight what stress is and what we can do to alleviate it to manageable levels.

Definition of stress

Stress is hard to define, as everyone experiences stress in different ways. Everyone at some stage will reach their personal level of coping limit. Exceeding this limit will make us feel out of control and unable to manage. Sometimes this feeling can allow us to become creative on how to deal with a situation and we push ourselves out of our comfort zone to seek a solution. This kind of stress can be positive, as long as you are not put into scenarios like this a lot. If you are in a stressful situation and you can’t relieve it by finding a solution, your stress levels can spiral out of control to such an extent that your physical and mental health can suffer.

Symptoms of negative stress

Anxiety catapults your body into “fight or flight” mode, causing symptoms like headaches, fatigue, skin breakouts, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability and feeling constantly overwhelmed by everyday tasks. Stress impacts all aspects of our lives and can make sustaining relationships difficult. It can affect all areas of our health and well-being too, even our immune system can suffer making us susceptible to viruses and disease.

How to manage stress

You can control stress in a number of different ways. It is vital to discover a stress reliever that works for you. Stress has become such a problem in our modern day world that Mindfulness & Wellbeing Courses have been specifically designed to teach you methods of stress management. Some methods can be used every day, such as inhale and exhale exercises. These help us to focus on the “here and now”, calm down the body’s response to situations and allows us to function in a calm way.

If you find that the cause of your stress is continuous, try to eliminate it from your life. This could be the case if you’re in an intense, toxic relationship. Unless you free yourself the stress will keep reappearing, no matter how many stress relieving exercises you carry out.

Can you increase your resilience to stress?

Most causes of stress cannot change. Increasing your ability to cope in a stressful situation can only be a good thing. Stress management is great to add to your life. This could be in the form of meditation, mindfulness, yoga, visualisation and breathing exercises. Another great stress reliever is exercise and getting outside in the fresh air.